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© 2021 The Somerville Times. All rights reserved.
By William C. Shelton
(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)
State transportation officials are extorting $50 million from Somerville to help fill a cavernous budget deficit created by their own mismanagement of the Green Line Extension. It’s a shakedown that is unprecedented in Massachusetts.
Despite the apparent suddenness of last Thursday’s announcement, this isn’t happening because Mayor Curtatone caved in before the bargaining began. On the contrary, negotiations have been ongoing for some time. And multiple reliable sources agree that the Department of Transportation’s Soviet-style bargaining began with a demand for more than double the $75 million that Somerville and Cambridge finally agreed to pay. But it came down to an ultimatum.
The resulting $50 million encumbrance represents a crisis. The danger is to our city’s fiscal health and taxpayers. We rely on state aid to meet a quarter of our budget. When state finances catch cold, Somerville’s catch pneumonia, and state tax collections were down in April, the month that they normally turn up.
This comes at a time that we face serious new capital costs—upwards of $100 million for a new high school, well beyond that for a half-century overdue sewer reconstruction, and new police and fire stations. Meanwhile, ever-rising home and business property taxes have the potential of turning the current displacement torrent into a cascade.
The opportunity side of the crisis is winning state approval for a transfer fee. Community advocates, many aldermen, and the mayor have previously agreed that a 1% transfer fee is essential to maintaining some measure of housing affordability.
But the governor and and state legislative leaders have publicly expressed their opposition to new taxes, and their desire to keep municipal taxation uniform across the state. Their approvals are necessary to pass the home-rule petition that instituting a transfer fee would require.
The $50-million Green Line assessment’s imposition enables us to position our transfer fee as a special case, as defined by Somerville’s unique circumstances. And we should now seek a 2% rate, as already exists in Duke’s and Nantucket Counties. Those circumstances and the argument’s logic are as follows.
Our city bears greater burdens to support regional transportation than any other in the Commonwealth. Over 200,000 vehicle miles per square mile are travelled through Somerville each day. People who live or work here account for a miniscule fraction of those miles.
Six diesel rail lines lacerate our neighborhoods, truncate our streets, and spew carcinogens, huge volumes of ultrafine particles, and twenty times the nitrogen oxides emitted by equivalent gasoline engines. That’s 15,000 trips per Somerville square mile per year.
But when the MBTA’s deferred maintenance shuts down a bridge, they do not respond promptly. It took them 2,245 days to reopen Lowell Street, while plenty more Somerville bridges need serious structural attention.
These burdens are killing us. Most years we have the highest heart-disease and lung-cancer excess-death rates per square mile in Massachusetts, even though we have no industrial sources of pollution and a below-average smoking rate. Our kids’ incidence of asthma is off the charts. Many of them will have diminished breathing capacity throughout their lives because of the damage that ultra-fines are doing to their developing lungs.
Somerville has been promised help with these conditions for 45 years. A 1971 MassDOT plan to mitigate I-93/Route 38 pollution, which proved to be ten times federal limits, was never implemented. A 1990 consent decree to extend the Green Line was ignored until the Conservation Law Foundation went back to court and won a 2007 settlement obligating the Commonwealth to complete GLX construction by 2014.
Now we are expected to pay a $50 million ransom that we can’t afford for a stripped bare GLX. Gross MBTA mismanagement and sketchy Department of Transportation oversight blew a billion-dollar hole in the project budget. Our stunted commercial tax base leaves us hard pressed to pay the ransom, much less the other capital expenses confronting us. Our best near-term opportunity for substantial commercial development is Union Square and Boynton Yards redevelopment, which requires a Green Line extension.
To pay the ransom, promote economic development, and slow down displacement, we must harness a runaway housing market with a transfer fee.
The chances are good for broad support among our elected officials for this option. The mayor advocated a transfer fee in his inaugural address in January. At a 2% rate, it could ease fiscal pressure while accomplishing the objectives that he initially intended for it.
Board of Aldermen President Bill White gave testimony at the combined Mass DOT and
MBTA Fiscal and Management Control Board meeting on Monday that produced a commitment to proceed with the project. In his remarks, he recommended using transfer fee revenues to service the GLX assessment.
Afterwards Senator Pat Jehlen told me, “If wisely structured, a transfer fee could capture a portion of speculative profits in behalf of working families.”
The unprecedented and unjust $50-million hit commends our elected officials to seize the moment by passing, and winning home-rule approval of, a transfer fee—and by locking in $50 million as the most that Somerville will pay for the state to make good on 45 years of false promises.
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Well said, Bill!
The proposed transfer tax was, and always was, earmarked for affordable housing. The Mayor said this repeatedly, the BOA said it repeatedly, and the Sustainable Neighborhoods Working Group addressed this issue on that basis from the beginning.
To suddenly suggest that any revenue from the transfer tax be robbed to now cover for GLX shortfalls is outrageous.
Especially since we haven’t heard of one penny being kicked in by beneficiaries like Magellen/US2 (a billion dollar multi-national corporation), Greentown Labs, and other private companies that will reap millions in profits if the Green Line into Union Square is realized soon enough.
To steal the transfer tax benefits that were promised to our most vulnerable and threatened residents to stuff into someone elses pockets would be one of the most disgusting cases of public betrayal and corporate welfare in the history of the commonwealth.
do different from the 25 million shack down for the orange line station at assembly row
Watch the medicine man terminologies in the article “And we should now seek a 2% rate, as already exists in Duke’s and Nantucket Counties.” Area where movie stars, money moguls, society elite, etc., come for the summers and build multi million dollars homes.
“transfer fee could capture a portion of SPECULATIVE PROFITS.” i.e. paying beads for the Brooklyn bridge.
”
200,000+ vehicles” commuting through Somerville everyday…Time to install automatic toll booths.
Bridge shutdowns, sort of ironic when one of MA well to do towns a few years back had a bridge fail, they brought in th MA national guard and
built the bridge over the weekend….God help us that Chumley’s may be inconvenienced and drive a mile further to cross the river in his Rolls Royce.
We need to keep/rehab existing High school. “the sky is falling” claims by officials ref to bldgs. in danger of falling down. i.e. old Union Square police & fire stations that same city hall rhetoric was used yet they stand strongly intact today, one as tavern the other SCAT & credit union.
The theatrics of the mayor rushing into the BOA meetings with the line that they have o pass $$$ for an issue right there and then. Ex; $25 million ++ bond issue for developers infrastructure required (IKEA withdrew and the taxpayers are stuck with it now.) Bringing in a non-profit TAX-EXMPT healthcare organization where IKEA should be, thus another screwing to the taxpayers.
Congressman Capuano repeatedly has said there were no guarantees that the federal government would have $$ for he whole project.
They should have just used the existing tracks and purchased those gangcars where you send & propel the car by pumping the handles up n down. two person accommodation – no overcrowding. Thus no pollution, plenty of exercise, and if one breaks down you can lift the car off the tracks and place it on the wayside..thus no commuter rail delays.
best solution
A transfer fee is just passing down the extortion from the state, to the city, to the people. Maybe some can afford it, but most hard working people who may have to move for any number of reasons cannot. A transfer fee will not affect investors, they will continue to buy multi families as investment properties and pass on the cost in increased rents. For young families choosing whether to buy and settle in Somerville or not a transfer fee would be a huge discouragement. Anyone buying at todays prices is not counting on the huge appreciation Bill has probably enjoyed, and facing paying a $10,000-$20,000 tax if they have to move because of a job change, sick family member, or any other cause would cause anyone to think twice about settling down in Somerville.
All this won’t really matter as we know it will go way over that before it is done. By the time it even starts it will again go over budget and money again will be an object. 50 million will be nothing compared to the billions it actually will cost. If no more funds will be available it will have to come to a halt if nothing is built into this for that purpose. The whole business of this is a mess. Funds will be even tighter as there is no money. CAP made good points also. This project does not have what it needs to get started. We are trillions in debt, money is going to really tough to get, no matter what.
Well said ritepride. Scotty will beam them up, problem solved. No tracks and no construction needed.
Plain and simple, this is just another tax against the middle class and families that want to move into home ownership. If the intent is to go after “speculative profits” there should be a sliding down rate based upon years of ownership.
No TheoNa, it is for the screwed up way they are working out the GLX problem. As CAP said the tax was being set up for another purpose. This whole business has been handled wrong from the start and getting worse. They keep increasing their chances on losing this.
i wont be alive to ride this damn train!
What do state and local governments do when faced with budget shortfalls from ill-conceived and/or mismanaged projects? Sell naming rights! Just a few ideas off the top-of-my-head:
– Waste Management International’s Trash-Fire On Rails
– Disney’s Mister Toad’s Slow, Unexplained-Delay-Filled Ride
– PBS’s Thomas & Friends Train of Confusion and Delay
(featuring Sir Topham Hatt’s shady brother-in-law Buddy)
– Wynn Resort’s Express to Personal Destitution
– AMC Network’s The Walking Dead GLXocalypse.
Feel free to add your own. Remember, there are no bad ideas just badly managed infrastructure projects!
When I read Bill’s article a couple of months ago advocating a transfer tax for affordable housing, I thought to myself that the odds arevery slim. The state legislature has turned down something over a half dozen transfer tax petitions from cities and towns in this session. That’s why the key phrase in this article is “unprecedented in Massachusetts.” As I understand it, the argument is that basing a home rule petition on “unprecedented” circumstances improves the odds; and increasing it from 1% to 2% covers both affordable housing and the GLX.
I don’t buy the argument that it is a brutal burden on homeowners, when home values in Somerville are going up 15% per year. But I am sympathetic to Frankly’s and TheoNa’s arguments about people who are forced to move before they accumulate equity. So there should be the possibility of an exemption or abatement, in the interest of justice.
In the end, though, I fear that A Moore may well be right. If the MBTA idiots “blew a billion dollar hole in the project budget,” I don’t have a lot of faith in there getting it right now.